QlikView selections

Generally, in QlikView, selections are also referred to as filters. Let's explore selections by going to QlikView and opening up the Movies Database file. Let's move to the Dashboard tab to see the selections in action:

Here, we have different types of selections available, such as Director, Actor, and Title.

These can be referred to as a selection, filters, or a list box, which will be covered later. But, for now, let's go ahead and use selections as the terminology.

The selections we mentioned previously are all different types of text selections that I have at my disposal. At the top, I have some numeric selections as well, such as Movies by Rating. This has five selections for five stars, and I can select any rating between 1 to 5, and see the Dashboard view refreshed for me. For example, let's select a movie rating of 5 to see which movies have five star ratings, which gives us the following output:

The dashboard is now filtered with the movies that got a five-star rating. With this, we understand that within QlikView, numeric filters are generally given at the top, and textual filters are generally given on the left-hand side. The placement of filters or the selections is not a mandatory requirement, it's just that, over a period of time, that's how QlikView developers have been accustomed to using the numeric and textual filters, and it has automatically become standard.

The next thing about the selections that I want you to observe in the numeric filters in the preceding screenshot, is that only 5 has been highlighted as green. It is an important rule related to the selections in QlikView, where all the values that are grayed out are not related to the selection.

Also, in the textual filters, you will see that there are a lot of values that have been grayed out. This means that all those directors have never created any movie that have been rated as a five. On the other hand, there are a few directors, such as Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen, who have a lot of five-star rated movies. For example, Woody Allen has eight different movies with five-star ratings.

So, if I am really interested in seeing which movies those are, I can click on Woody Allen to filter them. So, let's go ahead and select Woody Allen. This gives us the following screenshot:

We can see eight movies in the textual filters, such as A Midsummer Night's..., Another Woman, Bananas, Hannah and Her Sisters, and many more. So, now we have an idea about the different types of selections that you have.